


Fabrication

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 18:50:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5551397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the age of ten - and some extra tally-marked days as well - Rey makes a doll: when he claims that she is lonely, and has perhaps been lonely all her life, he's not entirely wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fabrication

…

It takes Rey exactly five days – days are important, numbers are important, that’s how this game is played – to gather all the necessary pieces for her doll.

She holds up every uniform scrap for sedulous inspection, to judge how the light will change its color from behind: orange for the sand dunes rising high like waves around her, which catch and hold the sunset on their crests each afternoon, dun-white for the magnite plains which are as hard as bone beneath a covering dust and will crack the blade of a gravedigger’s shovel.

“There’s a saying about it, I think,” Rey tells the haphazard pieces, as she smooths them flat. She makes her voice guttural to mimic Plutt’s. _“‘Huh! You wanna complain about life? Try death – on Jakku, it’s not much easier.’_ ”

It takes her three days more to beat the fabric clean again, because she cannot spare water to properly wash it, then a further two days to comb any dirt and burrs from the raw nerf-wool she’s pilfered for stuffing.

“It’s not all bad here, though,” Rey amends, after threading her needle on the twenty-ninth try. She sits out in the whistling-empty desert air, one knee folded up beneath her. She wears the dented x-wing helmet tipped back on her forehead. “If you break into one of the old fighter cockpits, you can make believe you’re a real pilot – oh, and you should see how many stars we have, at night. There’s no other lights around to spoil them.”

(There is one more thing she could say, perhaps, about how every once in a while she will feel that huge and hollow silence beginning to echo with a sound she has not made – how something seems to briefly open within her, and fill her, and carry her heart up like a rising wind.

But perhaps she’s just dreamed this, and if you tell a dream aloud it won’t come true, so you must always keep such things to yourself. 

That’s another game she’s learned how to play.)

And Rey spends a final seven days sewing all these fragmented parts together, stabbing her fingers fifty-three times in the bargain – she’s been polishing her curse collection lately, and at least practice is useful with so many different languages to choose from – and can finally turn the finished doll over in her hands. 

“I couldn’t decide what face to give you,” she admits to the mute head, where a young or old face might possibly go. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d like it better this way, maybe. That means you’re just the same as I am.”

She waits.

(Time will wear the doll thin in places, Rey knows. It will twist the limbs and loosen the stitches and fade the colors, because everything on Jakku turns back to dust at the end.

But by then she will be somewhere else, someone else, and she will have no more need of it.)

Then Rey holds the doll tight against her chest, even though she’s ten years old now – ten years and six months and four days, to be exact, silver tallies shining in the dark – and should probably consider herself too grown-up for such things, but she decides it does not matter.

There’s nobody here to see her.

(So when an unmasked, old-eyed young man reaches into the furthest, safest corner of Rey’s mind, a great many tally-marked years later, it is this memory he discovers.

And it is this echo that comes back into his own mind, after another moment more, its impact as abrupt as that gravedigger’s first strike against an unyielding, bone-hard surface.

 _“That means you’re just the same as I am.”_ )

…


End file.
